Beethoven in Newcastle

Brendan Ward had already had a successful career in television production when he decided to try to convince pianist Gerard Willems to join him on a massive musical undertaking to record the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas. Gerard Willems' insistence on using an Australian piano led the pair to Newcastle, and the factory of Wayne Stuart.

"My obsession began with my mother who was a very accomplished pianist and a Beethoven fanatic. In a little town called Kingaroy in the 1950s there wasn't much to do at night time so my mother would play the piano and her love was Beethoven. She played endless Beethoven, so I was weaned - if you like - on Beethoven's milk."

"I regarded it as the norm as a six or seven year old, but of course it wasn't, so I was very lucky that my mother was a very cultured and classically-trained pianist. Thank heavens I was able to listen to her at night-time, I had a drip-feed of this wonderful music going into my brain from a very early age."

Brendan Ward has already had a very successful career in television production but when taking a break from work he went back to playing piano.

Little did he know that this would lead to the creation of a monumental collaborative work of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas.

"I went back to playing the piano and having collected the Beethoven sonatas through my life with my mother, I went back to playing some Beethoven,"

"My teacher suggested I study for a diploma but I wanted to change the syllabus because I wanted to play more Beethoven than the syllabus allowed."

"My teacher said, 'No, you can't do that,' but I wanted to so my teacher suggested that if I wanted to persist with it I need to speak to the guy in charge of repertoire named Gerard Willems at the Sydney Conservatorium. I'd never heard of him but eventually I got an interview with him."

This interview eventually led to years of recording in Newcastle's Conservatorium - the 32 Beethoven sonatas, played by Gerard Willems who insisted on playing on a Stuart piano.

"The beautiful part of this story is that the three of us - myself, Gerard Willems and Wayne Stuart - our paths had crossed magically before the Sydney 2000 Olympics,"

"Gerard had met Wayne Stuart two or three years before I met Gerard. He'd played the Stuart piano when it was in Melbourne. When I finally persuaded Gerard to do this recording of the 32 sonatas, his only insistence was that we record them on the Stuart piano."

The choice of the Stuart piano raised more than a few eyebrows.

"Remember I was a total outsider, I knew nothing about producing classical music. As far as I was concerned it should have been a Steinway because everyone recorded on a Steinway, but Gerard kept saying 'no no no - this is the piano we must record this on because this is a magnificent piano!"

"I had actually been at a concert at the Sydney Opera House about six or seven months before this happened. Gerard was there, Wayne Stuart was there, Hazel Hawke was there - it was a concert with the Australian Chamber Orchestra with Christopher Hogwood conducting Robert Levin,"

"Halfway through the concert, Christopher Hogwood stopped the concert and said, 'This piano is out of tune', and you could have heard a pin drop as 2,000 people in the Sydney Opera House concert hall held their breath."

"I've since found out - I didn't know Wayne Stuart from a bar of soap - but I've since found out from Wayne, and everyone agreed, that the piano was NOT out of tune, some people had the idea that Christopher Hogwood was being a bit of a pedant."

"Gerard Willems said that the pure harmonics of the Stuart piano could lead some people to think it's out of tune when it's not - they're just used to hearing a Steinway sound."

"So when Gerard suggested we record on the Stuart piano I said, 'But I heard a famous conductor say just a few months ago that this piano is out of tune so why would we want to risk recording a project of this magnitude on a piano which could be going out of tune all the time?', but Gerard was insistent and thank heavens he was, because the magic ingredient of this whole project was this fantastic piano."

You can hear Carol Duncan's full interview with Brendan Ward by clicking the attached link.